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Catholic Meditation - Tenth Sunday of Ordinary Time - Year A (Holy Trinity)

Martin Jumbam

This Sunday, Mother Church returns to the Sundays of the Ordinary Time, Year A. It is the tenth Sunday. In the Entrance Antiphon we pray: “Blessed be God the Father and his only-begotten Son and the Holy Spirit: for he has shown that he loves us. Amen”.

The Ordinary Time of the year had been interrupted by the Easter Season, which ended last Sunday with Pentecost. Today, the Church invites us to celebrate the Feast of the Holy Trinity: God as Father, God as Son and God as Holy Spirit, Three Persons in One. The doctrine of Three Persons in one God, equal in divinity yet distinct in personality cannot be understood by the human mind. It is a mystery.

A story is told of Saint Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, who lived in the 4th century after Christ. Saint Augustine was so preoccupied with the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity that he wanted at all costs to understand how God could be said to be one in three persons. One day he was walking along the beach and deeply reflecting on this matter. Suddenly, he saw a little girl carrying water from the sea in a tiny cup and pouring it into a tiny hole she had dug on the sand. Back and forth she ran to the sea and brought back water in the tiny cup, which she emptied into the tiny hole. After watching her for sometime, Saint Augustine went up to her and asked her what she was doing. She said she wanted to empty the entire sea into that tiny hole using her tiny cup. Saint Augustine shook his head sadly and asked her how in the world she thought she could ever empty the sea into such a tiny hole. She then asked him how he thought he could ever in his small head understand the mystery behind God being One in three persons. And with that, the child is said to have disappeared and it was only then that Saint Augustine understood that he was faced with a mystery.

Like Saint Augustine, we too are faced with the immensity of God’s mystery, which we can only understand with the mind of our faith. When he was on earth, Christ spoke about the Father who sent him (the Son) and about the Holy Spirit whom he (the Son) was going to send to strengthen his disciples. The Father gave to the Son and the Son gave all that he received from the Father to the Holy Spirit. It is this unity of purpose among the three persons of the Holy Trinity that we are celebrating today in the readings from Sacred Scripture. We pray for the grace of a strong faith to believe that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Three in One.

First Reading: Exodus 34: 4-6; 8-9.

In those days, Moses rose early in the morning and went up on Mount Sinai as the Lord had commanded him, and took in his hand two tablets of stone. And the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him, and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” And Moses made haste to bow his head towards the earth, and worshipped. And he said, “If now I have found favour in your sight, O Lord, I beg you, go in the midst of us, although it is a stiff-necked people; and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance.”

V/ The word of the Lord.

R/ Thanks be to God.

Comment

Exodus, the book that recounts the escape of Israel from captivity and bondage in Egypt, is the second of the first five books of the Old Testament. The first is Genesis, which deals with the origin of the world, mankind and the people of Israel; the third is Leviticus, which gives the lists of the laws of the priests of the tribe of Levi; the fourth is Numbers, which gives the list of those who came out of Egypt and wandered about in the desert; and the fifth is Deuteronomy, which is the second Law laid down by Moses before the entry into the promised land. These five books, attributed to one author, Moses, form a unit known collectively as the Pentateuch (from the Greek word for five books), or as the Torah (the Hebrew word for the Law).

The passage of our meditation is a conversation between God and Moses in which Moses admits that his people are headstrong with a litany of sins and faults to their name. Moses has reached a crisis point in his relationship with his people; Israel has apostasized by making a golden calf and worshipping it. The people’s rebellion notwithstanding, God still renews his covenant by inviting Moses to the mountain. In spite of his prayer begging God to forgive the people, Moses wants reassurance, ‘Show me your glory, I beg you’, he pleads with God. The mystery of their meeting casts an awe over the people, since Moses comes down from the mountain with his face shining too brightly to gaze at.

God’s nature of being “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness” remains intact. His love is never in question. It remains constant and everlasting. It is a love that continues to be faithful and forgiving even when the people are unfaithful in their own love towards God.

This passage calls on us to treat even people we consider our enemies with compassion and understanding. If you find your enemy’s donkey going astray, the sacred writer tells God’s people, you have the obligation to bring it back to him. If you find it under a burden, you have to help him out.

We can take home some lessons from this reading, one of them being the nature of God’s love that abides forever. It is the love we can depend on, the love that is not withdrawn when misfortunes come, the love that sees through our weaknesses but sets no limit to forgiveness. The love of one’s enemy is one of the new features in Christ’s message (Mt. 5: 43-48). God’s ceaseless love for his people is so great that he sends his only begotten Son to die for us, as we hear in the Gospel reading of this day.

Let us pray: Lord God, creator and ruler of your kingdom of light, in your great love for this world, you gave up your only Son for our salvation. Listen to our supplications, as you listened to your people who rebelled against you. Renew your love in our heart and help us to live in perfect unity with our fellow Christians. We make our prayer through Christ our Lord who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit one God forever and ever. Amen.

Second Reading: 2 Co. 13: 11-13.

Brethren, rejoice. Mend your ways, heed my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

V/ The word of the Lord.

R/ Thanks be to God.

Comment

Corinth was one of the most important commercial cities in the Roman Empire. Like the city of Douala, it was teeming with many different religions and with temples dedicated to all sorts of gods, and was notorious for its low level of morality. In fact, Corinth became synonymous with immorality.

That was the city in which Saint Paul preached the Christian message and God helped him to found a flourishing Christian community. From Acts of the Apostles (18:1-18), we know that Paul founded the Church of Corinth with the help of Silas and Timothy during his second missionary journey. He spent more than a year and a half preaching in that city. As it was his custom, he began by preaching in the synagogue to Jews but because of the opposition he received from some of them, he decided to concentrate on preaching to the non-Jews only, hence his name as an Apostle to the Gentiles.

The passage of our meditation is Paul’s words of farewell to his Corinthian Christians. In it he shows his great affection for them, exhorting them to practice the fraternity proper to Christians and thus live in concord and peace. He calls on them to be cheerful. As he tells his converts of Philippi, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, Rejoice!” (Phil 4:4).

Joy is something characteristic of Christians because their awareness of being sons and daughters of God tells them that they are in the hands of God; as such, they should never be sad. Saint Jose Maria Escriva, the founder of the Opus Dei, urges us to go out into the world and be “sowers of peace and joy through everything we say and do” (Christ is the Passage, 168).

Saint Paul says that the saints are sending greetings to their Christian fellows of Corinth. Those he refers to as saints are the Christians of Macedonia from where he is writing this letter. His final greeting to them, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all”, has been included in the Liturgy as one of the salutations at Mass. It clearly refers to the Holy Trinity: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, three in One, the feast we are celebrating today.

Commenting on this passage, Saint Thomas points out that this greeting includes references to all necessary supernatural graces: “The grace of Christ, by which we are justified and saved; the love of God the Father, by which we are united to him, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, who distributes the divine gifts to us.”

Let us pray: “Almighty and everlasting God, to whom we owe the grace of professing the true faith, grant that while acknowledging the glory of the eternal Trinity and adoring its majestic unity, we may be confirmed in this faith and defended against all adversities. We make our prayer through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

Gospel: John 3: 16-18.

God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but should have eternal life. For God sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. He who believes in him is not condemned; he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God.

V/ The Gospel of the Lord.

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

Comment

Today we celebrate God as Father, God as Son and God as Holy Spirit, three persons in one God. As mentioned in the introduction to this Eucharist, this is a mystery which can only be understood with the mind of our faith. The Catholic Church makes many references to the Holy Trinity. We baptize and confirm “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The Church anoints the sick and absolves sinners “in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” We begin Holy Mass “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” We end our Holy Mass by making our prayer through “Jesus Christ your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit one God forever and ever.” We recite in our Creed that “We believe in one God the Father almighty … We believe in Jesus Christ the only Son of the Father … We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life.”

Every aspect of our lives as Christians is deeply embedded in the Holy Trinity: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. We heard in the first reading from Exodus how God so loved the people of Israel that even when they revolted against him and began to worship false idols, he did not turn his back on them because he is “a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity.”

The Gospel tells us that God was not only kind and compassionate to the people of old. It is in our times that he sent his only begotten Son to die for us. God is love and he continues to pour his love on you and me and on all our loved ones; even on those who may hate us, or those we may not hold in high esteem, for one reason or another. He lets his sun shine on the rich and poor alike (Mt 5: 45).

On this Holy Trinity Sunday we celebrate God who is love, who is compassion, who does not abandon us even when we turn our backs on him. He still sends us his Son to rescue us and the Holy Spirit to strengthen our faith and make us worthy of a place in his kingdom. God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He who wants to see the Father, as Jesus tells us, must keep his gaze permanently fixed on him (Jesus), the Father’s Son. He who keeps God’s word becomes the abode of the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, who comes to us from the Father through the Son.

The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, make us partakers of their divine love and life. This Holy Trinity Sunday calls on us to enter into the intimacy of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit by forgiving our brothers and sisters who might have wronged us as the Father never fails to forgive us our own trespasses.

Let us pray: “God, we praise you: Father all-powerful, Christ Lord and Saviour, Spirit of love. You reveal yourself in the depths of our being, drawing us to share in your life and your love. One God, three Persons, be near to the people formed in your image, close to the world your love brings to life. We ask this through the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, One God, true and living, forever and ever. Amen.”